Thorazine Beach by Bradley Harris

Purpose-manufactured evidence bags with labels—not at all like the plastic sandwich baggie I’d improvised with. Official Memphis PD marker pen. “Next time,” he said, “try your best not to get mayonnaise and tuna all over your evidence.”
    “So this geriatric nutcase,” I said. “He’s still out there?”
    “Alive and not quite well, so far as we can tell,” Mac said. “Perhaps you two’ll meet one day.”
    “Christ, I hope—”
    “Might turn out to be a nice old guy,” he said. “I’m seeing the two of you together…rockers on the front porch…talkin’ old times.”
    I heaved a resentful sigh and broke a smile at the same time.
    “And if he’s still luggin’ the shotgun,” he said, “maybe you can still outrun him.”

19.
25 July, early afternoon
Collierville
    If you think you’re too classy for Memphis, Cordova, or Bartlett, you live in Germantown. Think you’re too classy for Germantown, you live in Collierville, one burg farther out. Too classy for the planet, you live in Meadow Woods. Nominally, legally, administratively part of the city of Collierville, Meadow Woods drew a line, distinguishing itself. ‘Now Entering Meadow Woods’, said a brick-and-stone sign, ringed in meticulously maintained monkey-grass and blooming irises, a rig that couldn’t have cost less than my annual income. Fitting—some of those lots were large enough they’d be a chore to walk across, and some you’d be tempted to drive. If Germantown had “gated communities,” I thought, this one would have machine guns and concertina wire. All, of course, correctly landscaped.
    Somewhere back at city hall, these houses had street numbers. Out here, though, they had names.
The Briars. Cotton Hill. Levee Reach
. Clayton McCorkle’s
Winter Bayou
, I saw from the copied plat I’d scooped from Collierville’s planning department, was the only number on its street. A street I’d not be driving, I saw. The iron gate would have looked formidable if I’d been driving a tank. How he’d scooped private possession of a whole city street for his own was anyone’s guess. But, then, there’s a lot goes on in Memphis that has to do with extraordinary privilege.
    I hadn’t come to see Barbara Jean, wasn’t intending to go in. I just wanted to see the place for myself. And couldn’t quite. Not from the gate, which gave a view of a curving rock wall and another inner gate. And security cams, on poles and trees—moving cams, I noted. I backed Mitzi out, guessing my picture had already been taken at the outer gate, looked for another viewpoint, and found it, finally, on the north side of the property, where some horticulturally horrific disease had evidently struck a stretch of hedge and left its limbs bereft of leaves. I parked, struggled up a rise, clambered to the top of the stone wall and over the crest of the rise where the wall ran lower than elsewhere. And, through the hedge’s barren limbs, saw.
    The house loomed out of the hilltop, about the size of an aircraft carrier. A house built less for its style than for its brute visual weight. Not necessarily handsome, architecturally. And certainly not what you’d call beautiful. Impressive, yes—in the way a gigantic warehouse is impressive, when you see one for the first time. Imagine a McMansion—the kind you see in GeeTown and Collierville. You know how they assemble those. A French farmhouse roof here, white columns there, over here three dormers, there an eyebrow window, now a gable. A dog’s breakfast. “Architectonic,” you might say—a borrowing from every period, movement, regional style, and every bit of it
faux
. Like an ignorant, angry kid who stole every Lego piece in town and all he wanted was to make whatever he was building
big
.
    Clayton McCorkle had made it big. In construction, mostly—not surprising, given the acres of square-footage I was staring at. I’d scouted him out at the Crescent Club, on the say-so of a couple of buddies who hung